Re-Air: How Raphael Made—and Unmade—the Renaissance

0:01Ben here. This is a re-air of a favorite episode, an interview Kate Brown did with me about the Raphael Sublime Poetry Blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That show closes later this month, so you still have a chance to see it. After this interview, my colleague Katya Kazakina also wrote a big feature for Artnet titled The Multi-Billion Dollar Maneuvers Behind the Met's Raphael Show. It goes into the extraordinary feats it took curator Carmen Baumbach to bring this show off. If your imagination is fired, take a look at that too. In the meantime, here's my interview.

0:42Leonardo is the brain. His work is very heady, obviously. Michelangelo is the heart. His work is very emotional and dramatic. And Raphael, I think it's fair to say, is the face. I mean, he is Mr. Suave.

1:03Kate Brown:I'm Kate Brown, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

1:16Kate Brown:Raphael is one of those names that everyone knows. He's the Prince of Painters, a master of the high Renaissance, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has given him the full blockbuster treatment. Their highly anticipated exhibition, called Raphael's Sublime Poemetry, opened in March and is on view until this June. The show is the first comprehensive international loan exhibition ever dedicated to him in the United States, and there are 237 works of art in total, 33 paintings, 142 drawings, and his Sistine Chapel tapestries. There's loans from the Louvre, the Vatican Museum, the Prado, the Uffizi, and the British Museum.

1:50Kate Brown:And many of these works, according to the Met, have never been shown together, and some have never previously left Europe. It took 17 years to assemble the show. So no one quite captured divine beauty like Raphael did, but what is the story within the story of this artist who left such an indelible mark on Western art? I'm joined by art critic and podcast co-host Ben Davis, who's just published a review of the exhibition to dive into this question. Hey, Ben. Hello, Kate. Very excited to talk to you about Raphael Sublime Poetry. Yeah, me too. So, you know, as I mentioned, this was a highly, highly anticipated exhibition, and it's finally here.

2:25Kate Brown:Can you describe what people are walking into and give us a little whistle-stop tour throughout the exhibition? I think you gave a fine idea of the scope of the show. Most of them are drawings. So it's 33 paintings, I think, and some tapestries that are quite fun. And it roughly tells the story of his life. It starts with his early years and actually works by his father and goes through works by his master, his first teacher, Perugino, and then walks you through early works, gives you some pages by Leonardo and Michelangelo to show what else was going on during the Renaissance in his time. He was the younger artist, the artist on the come up during this time.

3:16And then it is a tour of greatest hits. There's the Alba Madonna from the National Gallery of Art, which is a very beautiful Madonna and child with baby John the Baptist. And there is a work that a lot of people, including myself, seem stopped by in the show is Portrait of a Young Woman with Unicorn from 1505, which is this little portrait of a young woman who is dressed in fine clothes with a ruby and pearl pendant. And she's holding this scruffy little unicorn in her lap. This is a marriage portrait to basically advertise her as a potential bride.

3:59Kate Brown:Wow. And then it goes on and on and on and concludes with his works in Rome. He's Mr. Rome, very much where he did the bulk of his work. and ends with works that tip over into a new kind of style, more Mannerist and less high Renaissance. Lots of stuff I didn't know there. There's a long vertical tapestry that recreates a work of his called St. Paul in Prison, where it depicts a praying St. Paul who's using his divine powers to summon an earthquake and has this decorative border. And at the bottom, there's a personification of the earthquake, which is this kind of superhero strongman bursting out of the ground.

4:46And he bursts through the decorative border at the edge. And it really looks like it could be a Jack Kirby comic book painting from the 1960s. So gives you the full breadth of Raphael. Pretty amazing to see in person.

4:59Kate Brown:Yeah, his work, it's so divine and perfect almost. And, you know, I think it's perhaps I'm curious what you think of this, but you mentioned in your review that the Met introduces him as one of the greatest influencers of all time. And I wonder what your reaction is to that. Like, what is going on with this framing? Yeah, the very first line of the Met's introductory text, the show says he is one of the greatest influencers of all time. I don't know. It's a bizarre framing to me. There's also, I should say, something like an immersive Raphael room where some of his famous murals that cannot travel from Rome are featured, like the School of Athens, perhaps the most famous and liked Raphael work.

5:42It's funny, you say that he is hard to argue with, or I think they are beautiful. An interesting thing about Raphael is that in his time, he was the guy. As you said, he was the Prince of Painters. He was the most famous Renaissance artist in his day. And for ages and ages and ages and ages afterwards, he was considered the height of excellence. In the 1900s, he sort of became associated with the academic style that people were more rebelling against. Famously, the pre-Raphaelites wanted to go back to before Raphael. Art felt more direct. Something about the level of polish and sweetness that he is known for and that he perfected became a little bit icky to people and seemed a little bit sentimental.

6:39His Madonna and Child paintings became associated with religious kitchen away. So I think the show is hard to argue with. But on the other hand, it is trying to find a contemporary story for him that reanimates these works. And I mean, I don't think the audience today really is that much invested in those debates. I think you essentially get the idea of Raphael just as like a name you know from the Renaissance, and people are just here to see quote-unquote Renaissance art. It's great art, but nevertheless, I think he is not a painter of great emotional expressivity. I do not think. He is a painter of great control and discipline and refinement and harmony.

7:29And, you know, for us living after the Romantics, our idea of art is very much about emotional expressivity and drama in a way that is in there. But it fits a little bit in an odd way with the legend of Raphael. I think we'll get into that.

7:47Kate Brown:Yeah. So before we get into also his stardom and the depths and heights of his career. So this is the Renaissance time. He was born in 1483, dies in 1520. Can you just say shortly, like, what was the sort of origin story of Raphael? Where did he come from? Yeah, he came from Umbria, which is not Florence, but it has its own artistic scene going on. He gets famous young. This show begins with this pencil self-portrait of himself where he really looks like a hungry young man with, like, long hair. And he's gazing out at you with a sense of confidence. He becomes a master artist, meaning that he can run his own workshop at 17.

8:33And then you just see him very quickly learning the styles of his time, like very hungrily trying to learn the best of what art had to offer in that period. The show makes a lot of his study of Leonardo. There were all these innovations coming out of Leonardo's work that had to do with different kinds of perspective, aerial perspective, being able to depict distances by modulating the colors and form, being able to use different kinds of shade in order to suggest the substance of a body and movement. There's a lot of, in terms of how figures twist in relationship to each other to give a sense of drama, and psychology.

9:18So Leonardo very famously kind of invents this idea that you express the inner life of the characters through their outer relationships with each other. You see that really famously in The Last Supper where every character is relating to another character. And there's kind of this movement of psychology that passes through the figures as they look at each other around the canvas. And you see Raphael assimilate that into his works where you have these configurations of characters who all have some sort of expressive relationship to the other characters in the canvas. Or a lot of these actually aren't canvases.

9:55It's before the invention of canvas painting. They're panel paintings, a lot of them. And then what I think is very interesting is that when he goes to Rome, he spends a few years in Florence from 1504 to 1508, where he doesn't have a lot of success. Like he goes there as a student of the masters and as an ambitious guy to make his name, and he just can't break in. But then his countryman or his paisano, Bramante, the Pope's architect, is also from his region, Umbria, and brings him in as the hot new thing to Rome. And he really makes his name doing these frescoes for the papal apartments. And in the early 1500s, he very quickly becomes an artist of almost unprecedented success.

10:51It was not unusual to work in a workshop. I mean, he got his start in Perugino's workshop. But he is like employing dozens and dozens and dozens of artists working for him and just turning it out, like doing all kinds of things. He also becomes in charge of all the archaeological projects in Rome. And then he gets tapped when Bramante dies to be in charge of the reconstruction of St. Peter's Basilica. So he is just doing a ton. Like he's in so much demand. Actually, it's funny. Although it was not unusual to work with assistants, Michelangelo, who was his rival at the time, he's also working in Rome doing the Sistine Chapel and so on, kind of sniffed at this.

11:38You know, he thought it was pretty vulgar. Michelangelo, who guarded his creative independence, very jealously basically thought this guy was kind of corporate.

11:47Kate Brown:Interesting. So this sort of reminds me of like the sort of Fordian like artist studios that we have today in some ways. Was he kind of one of the first to do this at such a scale so rapidly? Well, at that scale, yeah. I mean, and at this time, this was awe-inspiring to people. Just a representation of his power. It's an interesting thing that this show doesn't really go into, but fascinates me. As I said, he was considered the greatest artist of his age when he died. It was a huge to-do. He was buried at the Pantheon, and he became the model for artists for years and years and years, centuries afterwards.

12:25words. But a thing happens in the 19th century when the Romantic period gives us the idea of the independent artist as the most important thing. Because you see, in the industrial age, what becomes really important about art is the individual artist, the individual vision. And that wasn't really how Raphael was working. So in addition to seeming a little over-refined, to people in that time, where people liked the more stormy, romantic energy. There is something about that corporate way of production that sat a little bit strangely with people. And if you read the early theories of connoisseurship in the late 1800s, early 1900s, when they're trying to work out modern theories of authenticating art and stuff, Raphael is like a really interesting case because he's undeniably one of the major artists of all time, like the model for all these important artist, but he also undeniably did not work in this specifically autographic way where everything that was good about the work came from the hand of the master.

13:35So a lot of modern theories of connoisseurship use him as an object where they're working out, how do you tell what is Raphael and what is workshop of Raphael? Like what really is the signature of that he's in the mix himself personally. And then in this show, you see a little bit of that in the sense that his assistants, the people who he worked with, there's a bunch of works by them, but there's some works that are co-authored between him and them. And in some cases, it's still not clear who did what. You go through the catalog and there are a lot of really fine-grained scholarly debates about what parts of what are by who and so on.

14:13Kate Brown:So you mentioned Leonardo Michelangelo. So the Met actually had a show of Leonardo's work in 2003, Michelangelo in 2017. And now there's Raphael. And as you said, these three painters knew each other and they obviously had opinions about each other, as you've touched on. What was Raphael doing that was really distinct from these two other artists? Because, you know, if you kind of blur your eyes, they're painting similar scenes, but there's key differences between what each of them were doing. Oh, sure. Well, everybody was painting similar scenes. I mean, it's easy to overlook. I mean, we just almost don't think about it.

14:43But the personal content of these works is limited. They are all doing standard themes. Now, each of them invents their own variations on things and in some cases creates new types. Like the Mona Lisa invents a certain type of portrait pose. And then in this show, you see Raphael pick it up and synthesize it, do his own version of it. The way you might sum it up, I think this is intuitive to most people, is that Leonardo is the brain. His work is very heady, obviously. Michelangelo is the heart. His work is very emotional and dramatic. And Raphael, I think it's fair to say, is the face. I mean, he is Mr.

15:31Suave. His work is very graceful. He's a very dexterous artist. He does a lot of things. He's working in a lot of different styles and he's very good at taking a certain style and putting it at the disposal of his patrons for whatever they want to do and coming up with new fresh ways to do it. But his main thing is grace and harmony and really perfecting this beautiful style that really becomes the standard of beauty going forward, the standard of what beautiful art looks like.

16:06Kate Brown:And in particular, feminine beauty, right? Leonardo and Michelangelo were not painting women in quite the way that Raphael was. Well, it's an interesting thing. I mean, both biographically, one thing we know about both Leonardo and Michelangelo is that they preferred men romantically. And Raphael really preferred women. He is one of art history's ladies' men. And that's part of his legend. And it shows in their art. I mean, the main memorable scenes in Michelangelo are mainly male nudes. I mean, if you look at the Sistine Chapel and the birth of Adam with Adam touching fingers with God and his beautiful form, and you look over and see Eve off to the side looking on, she really looks like she's not invited to the party.

16:55Raphael, meanwhile, he really specializes in female beauty and the female form more than they do, particularly in the Madonnas, of course, which draws on stuff Leonardo was doing, but it's really his signature, is the Madonna and child. But the Met doesn't do a lot with this, but Vasari, his biographer, who sort of invents art history on top of the achievements of these figures in the Renaissance, he makes a lot of Raphael's sex life. It really becomes part of his legend. I'll read you some of the passages. He says, Raphael was very amorous and fond of women and was continually pressed into their service.

17:38He was always indulging his sexual appetites. And on this, his friends were probably more indulgent and tolerant than they should have been. Wow. Well, value judgment there. Yeah. And Raphael died young, relatively, at 37. And part of that legend, too, is sort of a rock star death. The way Vasari put it, he said, Raphael kept up his secret love affairs and pursued his pleasures with no sense of moderation. And on one occasion, he went to excess and returned home with a violent fever. And then he goes on to say that Raphael was too ashamed to say why he was sick and the doctor misdiagnosed him and bled him.

18:23And then he fell sick and passed away.

18:26Kate Brown:On Good Friday, nonetheless, too. On his birthday. A poet's death. Indeed. We'll come back to that in a bit. But, you know, I think we've started to sort of build this picture of this guy. And another thing that I think is really important to kind of understanding the essence of Raphael is something that you bring up in your review. This studied nonchalance, there's an Italian term for it, and an acquaintance of his, Baldessari Castiglioni, has sort of come up with this. And he's, I think, a subject of one of Raphael's paintings, right? In this show, very near to the portrait of a young woman with unicorn, it's another portrait, his portrait of Baltasare Castiglione, who was a buddy of Raphael's.

19:08And he wrote a book called The Book of the Courier, which was an advice guide for young men in courtly circles about how to behave. And he coined this term sprezzatura, which means a nonchalance. The ideal of behavior was to, in all things, be stylish without seeming to be stylish. Actually, there's a quote from him, you can read in the catalog, where he talks specifically about how men should wear black. They should wear dark colors. That's the ideal. You want to show off, but you want to be serious. It sounds very much like a New York gallery opening. And his portrait of Castiglione has him dressed all in these black velvets and furs, very fine clothes, and against a black background.

20:00So embodying what he preached. And I think it's fair to say that that value of controlled elegance is something that also flows throughout Raphael's work.

20:13Kate Brown:Yeah, just almost like hipster artists of his time or something, right? Like this idea of quiet luxury. It's a bit quiet luxury, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

20:39Kate Brown:You've described him also as this kind of archetype of a rock star. You've mentioned that he's got dozens of assistants, all these commissions. He's a very busy artist. But what do you mean by a rock star artist? Like, is he a party boy? Like, what's going on here? You kind of touched on it. I guess he died. Well, I should say, this is very much part of his legend, particularly as it's passed to us through Vasari. I think the Met is downplaying that for reasons of keeping things serious. They say in the material around the show that he probably just died of overwork because he was working a lot.

21:15However, it's worth saying he does live a rock star life. I would even say that Vasari's life of Raphael kind of originates this particular story we tell about artists that you see in every artist biopic, where they have great creative success, and then that becomes excess. So he goes to Rome. He becomes the Pope's favorite. and he is living the high life. When people call him the Prince of Painters, it's because he made incredible art, but it's also because he lived like a prince. There's a great letter in the catalog from one of his uncles who writes him in 1514, basically saying, look, you're past 30.

22:01Don't you think it's time you got married? You're at risk of bringing dishonor on the family, Raphael. And Raphael writes back, I have property in Rome amounting to 3 ,000 ducats in gold. And now, as a start, I have 50 ducats in gold because his holiness has given me to oversee the Fabrica di San Pietro with a stipend of 300 ducats in gold, which I will not lack for as long as I live. And I am sure that I will receive other monies. Furthermore, I am paid for my work however much I wish. I have begun to paint another room for his holiness, which will amount to 1 ,000 ducats in gold. So, my dearest uncle, I make you and all the relatives proud, as well as our fatherland.

22:46He's really, like, proud of, like, how much money he's making. He buys a palace, the Palazzo Caprini, which you see drawings of in this show. And as I said, he has a reputation as a womanizer. He does get engaged, but he clearly does not really want to get engaged and is drawing it out.

23:05Kate Brown:And there's a work in the show, right, of his mistress, what can you say about this painting and what does it tell us about his life? So again, it's interesting what the Met does and does not say here because there is a very famous painting in the show, again in the portrait section, called Portrait of the Nude for Narina from around 5020, that's the year of his death. And it is thought to be Margarita Lutti, which is his most famous mistress and she is topless in the piece she's wearing this negligee or a veil like a very diaphanous garment and she has one hand to one breast and the other in her lap which this is a conventional modest venus pose and the background is all this vegetation which is all various symbols of Venus, the goddess of love.

24:01She's also wearing an armband that has his name on it. So this painting has inspired lots of people's imagination. I mean, oh my God, it's so embarrassing. I was reading this review of another Raphael show from a quarter century ago in the Times, and they had like this French curator talking about the painting and saying, like, you look at the painting and you think they've just made love or they're about to make love. Like that's what it gives off. And the Met doesn't really go deeply into this. And there's lots of speculation about what this painting meant or means or what their relationship was.

24:37But it is very important to the mythology of Raphael, this figure. She was in the 19th century considered the model of models in terms of the imagination of artists in the romantic period, really romantic period about the lifestyle of the artist like this relationship between the two of them is really important i mean part of the death of raphael's mythology is that he died after a night where he partied too hard with her like they had too much sex and he died that's a very standard part of the mythology and uh tons of artists make paintings of raphael and uh margarita luti uh Ong makes one, Turner makes one, Balzac writes about them, Baudelaire writes about them.